5200 Galaxian

[Nukey Shay]

The video game market was in fine shap, but the companies fucked up and the retailers were too dumb to stop it.

 

The 2600 should have been discontinued in 1982. Sorry, but you gotta push the new system. Reduce it to a 2-system horse race and suddenly games aren't sitting off the shelves. Two viable systems would have been very profitable, with the 5200 likely the winner. The crash never would have happened if Atari hadn't flooded the market with product.

 

Where are you getting "2 systems"? There were more players in the market than just Atari and Coleco...and most of them also offered home computer capability either as an add-on or built-in to the system. The market was just oversaturated, and that was everyone's "fault". Not to mention, there were so many new choices for people to spend their entertainment dollars than on just video games. More companies, less dollars...do the math.

[NovaXpress]

The other systems were nothing but distractions. Intellivision, Odyssey, Astrocade and the rest were minor players by 1982. The Colecovision and the 5200 were the big two who should have dominated the new generation. Instead, the shelves remained crowded with the old generation and market collapsed. Atari's decision to keep flogging the 2600 is responsible for this.

[Paranoid]

I had the Colecovision first. Black unit... I don't remember if I just bought the Adam expansion or if I got a whole Adam with the white Coleco. I may have had both. I did have the 5200 for a SHORT while before I got the Coleco... my nephew 4 years younger than me, got a Coleco first, for Christmas, I think the same time I got the 5200... then in March, on my birthday, I got a Coleco, too.

 

I had a helluva Colecovision lineup, too. Had the super joysticks, the trackball, the steering wheel... tons of games. I wish I had held onto all of that shit, even when the consoles or controllers failed and were, for the moment, unreplacable. Hindsight...

[Nukey Shay]

If Galaxian is a symbol of Atari's failure, then Donkey Kong is a symbol of Coleco's failure.

Where the heck did "Galaxian is a symbol of Atari's failure" come from? The only thing it's a symbol of is Atari's inability to create an authentic Galaxian port. For the record, when Colecovision Donkey Kong came out it was pretty much universally hailed by the gaming press as one of the best arcade-to-home translations to date.

 

I don't know what you think the 5200's few liabilities are, but its biggest is the controller, and that is NOT easily addressed.

 

Did you actually ever play Colecovision Donkey Kong?

 

I remember some pretty scathing reviews of it. It sure looked good compared to 2600 Pac Man... but I wouldn't go much further than that.

 

I dunno...DK was the hot item and everybody wanted it. Best as I can recall, the only gripe against the ColecoVision was it's oversized doorknobs.

 

The Coleco Adam...on the other hand...was ripped to shreds in reviews.

[Nukey Shay]

The other systems were nothing but distractions. Intellivision, Odyssey, Astrocade and the rest were minor players by 1982. The Colecovision and the 5200 were the big two who should have dominated the new generation. Instead, the shelves remained crowded with the old generation and market collapsed. Atari's decision to keep flogging the 2600 is responsible for this.

 

Major or minor, it didn't matter. The consoles were out there...and there were people who were just as loyal to their older systems as there was wanting new ones. By the time both of them launched, the market was already at it's peak. So the only place to go was downhill. A market crash was inevitable.

[NovaXpress]

Alternative scenario:

 

We know that the video game industry brought in more money in 1983 than 1982. But there was too much unsold product still left over. Retailers were trying to work as many as six systems at a time. They needed to have the foresight to pick their ponies and ride them. But Atari kept up the 2600 promotion, encouraging the ridiculous notion that a system could have an eternal lifespan. So the O2 and Intellivision remained on the shelves as well, no one able to carve a big enough piece to survive. Atari's no-return policy was the poison dagger. Retailers panicked and dumped video games from their stores altogether. It's not like gaming companies wanted to go into deep freeze for a couple years, the retailers made that decision for them.

 

But let's say that the 2600 was put to rest for Xmas 81 upon the release of the 5200 (if they were just going to rip off the 8-bit design anyway they could have finished a year earlier). Retailers would have chucked the O2 as well. The Intellivision would have been killed off in Xmas 82 after the Colecovision's debut. It would have been a 2-system race going into 83, with enough gamers to support both until the NES era.

[Nukey Shay]

The flaw in that theory is that retailers would be doing everything in Atari's favor...which is hardly true. Retailers are after a market...if one exists. The demand for O2 and Intellivision products didn't die overnight, but on a steady decline, same as any console. So where were all these people that weren't buying next gen consoles (which were sitting on the shelves just as all others were)? They were off enjoying other things for a change. When the dollars were rolling in, it didn't matter if the pie was divided up a hundred ways...everybody got paid. Nobody was buying, so the pie wasn't there anymore.

If your theory regarding established consoles was correct, it would have affected the established 8-bit home computer divisions just as hard. But it didn't. Lack of support eventually did those in.

[NovaXpress]

People were still buying. 1983 sales were higher than 1982, but there was too much product left on the shelves. Overall it was a disaster. instead of re-strategizing and consolidating, the retailers just gave up.

 

Today a retailer doesn't throw everything out there, products better earn that shelf space. Sure, a fanbase can keep things going for a while on any particular system, but you have to move people to next generation systems in order to keep the ball rolling. The 2600 and O2 should have been discontinued. The fact that they were still being flogged as late as 1984 is like the N64 getting equal shelf space to the X360 today.

[Nukey Shay]

Sales were higher in '83 because profits were forced to be lower to keep up with the shrinking market. At the end of 1982, Atari had missed their profit mark by over 50% for the quarter. This snowballed into Atari's $half-billion losses for 1983. Just because it hit Atari doesn't mean that it should have hit everybody...unless the market was just not there anymore.

[NovaXpress]

History proved that video game buyers never went away. The retailers bailed out because they didn't understand the business. Nintendo showed the way and video games are now a permanent part of our entertainment menu. What supposedly happened in 1983 to make people hate games overnight? I still played them. None of my game-playing friends gave it up. The only problem was that we couldn't buy new games for about two solid years. The market was as solid as ever, the business was fucked.

 

Atari's profits are irrelevant. Their gross was enviable. How much money did they needlessly waste? How much would they have saved by concentrating on one system? The amount of money spent by gamers was greater in 1983 than it was in any prior year. You can't say that the marketplace was the problem.

[Nukey Shay]

How could a retailer turn a buck when they have to sell a game at a loss? Sure, sales might go up due to the cheap end price for the consumer...but the retailer gets stuck with the debt. As an out, many retailers promptly returned the bulk of unsold merchendise to the OEM when '82 didn't go as planned (i.e. as record 1981 profits led them to believe)...and that shot the companies all to hell for '83...not only paying for the previous year's loss, but also not having a very bright advance order future either. So the market carves itself to pieces...and the NES (unaffected by the US market) was able to leisurely step in.

[NovaXpress]

Yes, I agree that was the problem. I believe that a tighter market of 2-3 systems max would have prevented the glut and the price wars which caused the crash. Atari blew it by overestimating their market in 1982 and forcing nonreturnable product down the retailer's throats. 1983 brought the market glut which killed the golden goose until the return of the plumber. That glut could have been avoided.

[Nukey Shay]

Not really. There were plenty of people willing to make games in '82. Just not enough people to buy them at retail prices the next year. This is the "glut". Seems to exist in all forms of industry these days

[NovaXpress]

For the hundredth time, it's not about the manufacturers. Of course they wanted to sell all kinds of crap. The retailers screwed up by taking all the crap, getting stuck with too much inventory which led to the price drop which slid us right into the crash. The old games from 1982 were being liquidated at less than ten bucks each. That makes things tough for new software at $30-40. The retailers had the power to say "no" but they were too caught up in the hype to narrow the market when they needed to. Live and learn.

 

Video games have never gone away since, have they? The retailers learned.

[Paranoid]

"Live and Learn". I'm going to file that with "Who would ever need more than 640k of memory".

 

It all comes down to greed. I've sat in a hundred corporate outlook meetings and read a hundred business forcast reports and articles that predict pie-in-the-sky growth for "widget X" over the years. I've listened to CEOs and CFOs wax poetic about how they are creating new markets with unlimited growth potential. I've also seen them blame everything external and outside of their control (typically the consumer, going as far as to label them outright theives) for shriking markets.

 

As far as the live-and-learn model. Look at the nose dive the music industry put itself into for its steadfast refusal to embrace new technologies and methods of content delivery. The movie industry is now in a similar situation. In both cases, we can see a glut of product, much of it of very low quality, and the emergence of other forms of entertainment that are competing for the same finite pool of consumer discretionary dollars. Too often you'll see an emerging discretionary consumer product where the business model forecasts these huge growth and profits without any aknowledgement of where that money is going to come from. It isn't that consumers have billions and billions of dollars hidden under their beds that they're just hiding from merchants. In competition models, too many businesses do not accomodate for how diverse their competitors may be. The movie industry very rarely acknowledges that it is competing directly with the video game industry, but neither of these industries ever contemplates that they are also competing for the same money as theme parks and resturaunts. When their market turns, they look at the consumers, and may contemplate changing spending patterns, but they do not look at those businesses where the money has gone. The video-game crash occured in a time of conspicious consumption. It obviously wasn't that the money disappeared. It started going somewhere else. Retail models needed to change (PCs needed to become MORE accessible, and move out of speciality stores, consoles needed to become a little LESS saturated, moving out of Grocery stores, for example). While the second one sorted itself out, Atari never saw this about their 8 Bit line (or any of their PC lines, actually), while Commodore started pushing their systems in Department stores (my first C=128 was bought at a Gemco).

 

It wasn't just ONE thing... the retailers, or the consumers, or the manufacturers, or the flood. It was a perfect storm of circumstances.

 

The music industry wanted to blame piracy for declining sales, but the fact is, none of their efforts to discourage piracy increased their lost sales in the significant manner one would expect. They would argue that you can't compete with free... but clearly, Microsoft continues to compete with a free Linux very well (as well as being highly profitable despite with dealing with rampant piracy of their product for the last 20 years). Blaming P2P file sharing for the music industry woes and thinking that removing the P2P services would make the consumers go running back to Tower to buy piles of CDs was optimistic and overly-simplistic.

 

I think you're confusiing cause for correlation here. There were a lot of different symptoms that led to the crash. Hell, a *big* part of it might have been something as sociological as their largest consumer-base (boys between say, 8 and 14, at the time) hitting adolescence and discovering girls and drugs in the early 80s, without enough NEW boys between 8 and 14 in the pipeline interested to keep the market afloat. Certainly wouldn't be the single cause, but I know that by 1984 this was where *my* mind was... I didn't mind playing the occasional arcade game, but there was a period there where I had a *lot* of other activities on my mind beside plugging a cartridge in and playing an Atari game for hours on end. My focus changed from games and comic books to getting laid and getting high. I remember the handful of guys who never gave up on the comic books and video games, and... well... the social pressure not to be THAT kid was pretty heavy.

 

And the generation behind mine, they never caught the video game bug like our generation and the one right before. Call us the Donkey Kong generation and the one before the Asteroids generation. But what came after that was such a huge social phenomenon? I can't even think of a title for the generation after. The 16-Bit/68000 generation, which was fightinig games and super-busy side scroller transformer games and driving and biking simulators... But they had no Pac-Man, or Donkey Kong, or Asteroids and Space Invaders.

 

Like I said, lots of different things were going on to create the crash, and I don't think many people have bothered to look at it from every angle.

[NovaXpress]

As someone who's spent their life in marketing pop culture products, I have spent many many hours thinking about these issues. I think your analysis of the music industry is right on but your screed falls apart when you try to apply it to video games as well as to a different time period.

 

There's too many fallacies to comment on, but a couple of quickies: so you think that in 1983 all teenage boys suddenly decided to dump games for girls and drugs. Hmm, video games have been hot sellers since 1986. So that means that there were no girls and drugs over the past 20 years?

 

And no huge social phenomenon video games after 1983? Mario, Sonic, M.Bison, Pikachu, Sephiroth, Lara Croft, the square Tetris block and many many others would like to call "bullshit" on that.

 

The crash happened because of mistakes made by manufacturers and retailers, the consumer had nothing to do with it.

[Paranoid]

As someone who's spent their life in marketing pop culture products, I have spent many many hours thinking about these issues. I think your analysis of the music industry is right on but your screed falls apart when you try to apply it to video games as well as to a different time period.

 

There's too many fallacies to comment on, but a couple of quickies: so you think that in 1983 all teenage boys suddenly decided to dump games for girls and drugs. Hmm, video games have been hot sellers since 1986. So that means that there were no girls and drugs over the past 20 years?

 

And no huge social phenomenon video games after 1983? Mario, Sonic, M.Bison, Pikachu, Sephiroth, Lara Croft, the square Tetris block and many many others would like to call "bullshit" on that.

 

The crash happened because of mistakes made by manufacturers and retailers, the consumer had nothing to do with it.

 

I think that around 1983 a huge portion of the market for home consoles found other interests at about the same time that an oversaturated market began to crumble. Video games lost their allure as a *fad*, at this point, in particular, consoles. Those of us who didn't decide to get active social lives got Commodore 64s. You know, Nova, I think the problem you're running into is that you're reading things a little too literal and not thinking about the implications of what is being summarized, lately. Do I think that all teenaged boys decided "sex and drugs" on the same day of the same year, sending the video game console industry into a fatal tailspin? Of course not. Am I suggesting that the market was a growing, aging thing that was coming to a broad fork in the road of it's coming of age? Absolutely. Drugs, sex, school athletics, skateboarding, PCs, punk, speed metal, band-camp... whatever... A big portion of a HUGE segment of the overall market lost interest... and I don't think it was JUST the fault of the manufacturers. I think that it might have been an inevitable thing related directly to the onset of adolescence among the core market.

 

NO huge social phenomenon ARCADE video games. Every one you named was on a 3rd generation born-again console. NES, Genesis, Game Boy...

 

Asteroids, Space Invaders... 1979... first generation... all the dazed and confused 13-15 year old dudes in their cut-off jeans played these in Supermarket lobbies and Pizza Parlors... when I was 9... and the press went WILD covering them...

 

Pac Man, Donkey Kong... welcome to the 80s, dude... Now I'm the teenaged kid wearing a pair of Converse and ripped up jeans and a leather jacket and flock-of-seagulls haircut playing, with some 9 year old standing behind watching. Same thing... massive press coverage. Human Interest Stories about Pac Mania and Donkey Kong madness on the local news stations... But the kids that watched MY generation of 12-15 year olds playing never caught the bug like we had, or like the generation of adolescents BEFORE us had. There was a lull there, and the rebirth of the gaming industry was tangibly *different* than it had been before the crash. The hysteria was largely gone, and the "nerd" factor had definetly settled in around gaming. The first generation had illusions of being electronic gaming "pinball wizards"... immortalized in song by supergroups. Picking up hot rocker chicks at the dark arcade. By the time the industry started to really recover, those illusions were gone. Geeks who owned C=64s, then STs and Amigas, were into video games. The hysteria of being a FAD had gone, and has never really come back. There certainly have been titles that create fad hysteria to some extent... Sonic, the Mario World series, Tetris, MYST... the FPS, WoW, the GTA series... sure... but there has been nothing that just changed EVERYTHING the way the four early titles I mentioned did... and I don't think there ever will be again, within the boundries of current game technology and paradigms. It'll have to be something as revolutionary from today's video games as Pong was from the Pinball machines of that time.

 

What came after that? What social video game phenomenon that would generate human interest bits on local news shows? I mean, you're right... the titles you mention... but not ONE of them was a *hit* as an arcade original.

 

There was ABSOLUTELY an element of changing social tastes and opinions affecting the gaming industry that clearly played a role in the crash. The entire industry was going through an internal change, and the first video-game generations were going through radical changes in their desires, goals and interests.

 

Maybe it is just your lack of social experience or ability that makes you want to discount the social element as an important factor here. That must be it. If you can't see the social element of this, you're blind, and probably shouldn't be involved in marketing popular culture.

Edited March 29, 2006 by Paranoid

[ZylonBane]

What came after that? What social video game phenomenon that would generate human interest bits on local news shows? I mean, you're right... the titles you mention... but not ONE of them was a *hit* as an arcade original.

You must be using a really interesting definition of "hit" that doesn't include Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Geez, they even got turned into movies!

[Paranoid]

And you're going to compare Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and their impact on the public consciousness to Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, or Space Invaders?

 

The only reason those games *ever* got any press was *purely* negative press. It wasn't that they were revolutionary. As a matter of fact, you might have made an inadvertant distinction here. This is when graphics became realistic enough to disturb, and also to rob the imagination that the true classics *fed*. The only thing that made these games "hits" was the controversy that surrounded them.

[Nukey Shay]

I dunno...kids generally could care less if something is deemed controversial (sure, some do in an effort to piss off authority). All most people want to do is play a game. We never played Space Invaders or Pac-Man with that mindset, although classic games such as those were denounced as being morally-corrupting in their day as well. For the most part, those button-mashers were equally popular among young adults as kids anyway. So I dunno if controversy fueled them much in the arcades.

[NovaXpress]

Do I think that all teenaged boys decided "sex and drugs" on the same day of the same year, sending the video game console industry into a fatal tailspin? Of course not. Am I suggesting that the market was a growing, aging thing that was coming to a broad fork in the road of it's coming of age? Absolutely. Drugs, sex, school athletics, skateboarding, PCs, punk, speed metal, band-camp... whatever... A big portion of a HUGE segment of the overall market lost interest... and I don't think it was JUST the fault of the manufacturers. I think that it might have been an inevitable thing related directly to the onset of adolescence among the core market.

So the teenaged boys who have played video games for the past 20 years never developed any other interests. No one has experienced the onset of adolescence since 1983? Okay.

 

I was there and I can state for a fact that none of us teenaged boys in the 80s stopped playing video games. We just had trouble buying them for a couple years. Maybe that's why the C64 with all the available pirate games became the default system of choice until Nintendo pulled it together. We still went to the arcades. We still had the Ataris hooked up. This consumer exodus you speak of simply never happened.

 

Once again get a grip on the fact that more money was spent on games in 1983 than in 1982. The industry was so fucked up that they crashed while on an upswing!

[NovaXpress]

And you're going to compare Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and their impact on the public consciousness to Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, or Space Invaders?

 

The only reason those games *ever* got any press was *purely* negative press. It wasn't that they were revolutionary. As a matter of fact, you might have made an inadvertant distinction here. This is when graphics became realistic enough to disturb, and also to rob the imagination that the true classics *fed*. The only thing that made these games "hits" was the controversy that surrounded them.

That is so much bull. Tell me how many "Asteroids" movies and action figures and comic books were made. Street Fighter is about 15 years old and new toys are still hitting the shelves. Mortal Kombat might have sold a few toys and movie tickets as well. Don't try to tell me that the gameplay didn't kick ass as well.

 

You have no sense of perspective about that time period. Do you realize how small the video game audience was back then? Modern games like Tetris and GTA reach far more people and gain far more mainstream recognition than any classic other than Pac-Man.

 

Serious question, how old are you?

[Paranoid]

Well, Nova, it has been decades since I contemplated smuggling a video game into any class, son.

 

You're younger than me... far younger, I would guess. I've known that for quite some time. It just shows in the tone of your posts and your cock-sure attitude. You're not smart enough to know what you don't know. I wondered about it during the "punk" thread... but there have been several threads since where I've gone, "This kid is late 20s, max". You just remind me too much of my asshole brother-in-law who can't keep his mouth shut.

 

Which means you *could* be older, and just immature, of course.

 

I'd like to point out another thing... In the very post you are responding to, I said that when I was a 9 year old kid, Asteroids was new and being played by the 11-15 year olds and I would watch... I said that in the early 80s, I was an 11-15 year old, with 9 year old kids behind me watching me play Donkey Kong...

 

You do the math. This is just an example of where you pick and choose the information from posts that YOU want to hear, disregarding the rest, and aren't using any critical reasoning skills in your argument. The answer is right there in front of you, just how old I am, but you're too caught up in your own hyperbole to actually read much anybody ELSE posts in these threads. Which is, again, the clearest indicator that you don't have very much wisdom or maturity. I may be wrong about your age... I'd be surprised, but it is possible, but I'm not about your wisdom and maturity.

Edited March 29, 2006 by Paranoid

[ZylonBane]

Translation: The early 80s was the last time Paranoid was young enough to be in touch with youth culture.

 

All is explained.

[Paranoid]

LMAO...

 

Translation: Zylon is so young his balls haven't dropped, but he THINKS he knows the answer to everything.

 

Kids like you are why I let my subscription to XBox live lapse, Zylon.

 

See... *this* is the problem. We've been having these arguments with kids who weren't even born yet at the time we're discussing. It would be like me trying to argue what life in the 50s or 60s was "really" like.

Edited March 29, 2006 by Paranoid